The Search for a Poison Antidote

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If good intentions could stop the proliferation of chemical weapons, the scourge would have been cleaned up long ago. Over the past 63 years, 131 nations have signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which outlaws the use of poison gases. Yet at least 17 countries are believed to possess chemical weapons. They were most recently used last March, with hellish results, when Iraq unleashed mustard and cyanide gases on its own Kurdish citizens.

Like other high-minded declarations that followed the horrors of World War I, the Geneva Protocol has no teeth: although it forbids the use of poison gases, it bans neither their production nor their stockpiling. The result is that the issue of chemical weapons has returned time and again to the international agenda, stirring debate at the United Nations, at diplomatic conferences and at each of the four superpower summits since 1985.

This week the talk continues in Paris, where representatives from 142 nations have convened. The chances for a breakthrough anytime soon are slim. Only the U.S., the Soviet Union and Iraq have even acknowledged owning chemical arsenals. Yet in recent years, there have been claims that poison gases have been used by Libya against Chad, by Viet Nam against Kampuchean rebels and by Iran and Iraq against each other in their recently concluded war. It was Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds that prompted President Reagan to call for the Paris conference. The initiative was quickly seconded by President Francois Mitterrand of France, one of the countries that had unwittingly supplied Iraq with equipment that helps in the manufacture of chemical weapons. The results of that exchange, understates a senior French diplomat, "gave one pause."

A declaration of international outrage against chemical weapons and a reaffirmation of the Geneva Protocol may at least slow the trend toward poison gases. "There's a general consensus that use of chemical weapons is wrong," says William Burns, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "I think we want to re-establish that." The U.S. hopes that the Paris meeting will pump momentum into the Conference on Disarmament, a 40-nation effort to write a treaty that would ban the gases outright. As an interim step, several participants want to strengthen the U.N. Secretary-General's authority to investigate charges of chemical-weapons use.

Until recently, East-West distrust posed the largest hurdle to an effective ban. But in 1987, two years after Congress voted to end an 18-year moratorium on the American manufacture of chemical weapons, the Soviet Union acceded to U.S. demands for on-site "challenge inspections" to enforce a treaty. Today the larger obstacle is posed by Third World nations that are reluctant to give up what is known as the "poor man's atom bomb." Poison gases, after all, are cheap and easy to manufacture. "All a terrorist needs is a milk bottle of nerve gas," says a British weapons expert, "and that he can get from a quiet lab in a back street of Tripoli." Thus even if a treaty could be hammered out to the satisfaction of Moscow and Washington, says Burns, the U.S. would not sign unless every nation in possession of chemical arsenals agreed to it as well.